• The new app delivers a highly personalised user experience and includes new features, content and services to enhance the working lives of professionals in the Central Portfolio
• The launch comes as Centricity celebrates five years of innovation in Central community building

HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 18 December 2024 – Hongkong Land announced the launch of Centricity App 2.0. The new and improved digital gateway provides office tenants and their staff with more personalised and seamless access to Hongkong Land services, spaces, privileges and experiences in the Hongkong Land’s Central portfolio, all in the palm of one’s hand.

The launch of the new digital engagement service, the most comprehensive of its kind in the Hong Kong market, comes as Hongkong Land’s Centricity platform – an exclusive collection of spaces and services designed to enhance the working lives of tenants – celebrates its fifth anniversary with strong growth in usage. Since its inception in 2019, Centricity has become a vibrant community-building platform in Central, offering an extensive blend of online and offline amenities for businesses, their employees, non-profit organisations and luxury brands.

Neil Anderson, Director and Head of Office, Commercial Property, Hongkong Land, said: “Centricity is an unmatched tenant engagement platform in Hong Kong and we are delighted by its success as it marks its fifth anniversary. As well as providing tenants and their employees with convenient and flexible access to a broad range of services, amenities and spaces in the heart of Central, it curates exclusive privileges and experiences that meet their diverse needs. In short, it embodies our newly introduced brand promise – “Experience is central.”

“The launch of our next generation tenant service, Centricity App 2.0, exemplifies the Company’s core values. This innovative, highly personalised service anticipates what our tenants want from the workplace ecosystem of the future and underscores our focus on collaborating across multiple touch points in their working lives.”

The new digital service is the culmination of years of analysing tenant behaviours and usage data and anticipating their future needs. The new app sports a significantly refreshed look, enhanced features and exciting new content, elevating the user experience. Key highlights include a personalised and customisable landing screen, access to curated privileges and events and improved information sharing, with new real-time public transport arrival information in the core Central area.

Tenants will also benefit from more seamless access to workplace services provided by Hongkong Land. This will include temperature control in offices[1], indoor air quality monitoring, enhanced visitor access management and more convenient meeting rooms and hot desk booking at Centricity.

Leveraging the original Centricity App’s 22,000 registered users, the 2.0 app is expected to strengthen the professional community within Central by facilitating connections through events and information sharing among tenants and customers.

On the events side, it will complement Centricity’s Concentric Event Space in Chater House, a dynamic 7,000 sq. ft multi-purpose space for corporate and luxury customers. In 2024, Concentric received 230 bookings, a significant increase on the near-50 in its first full year of operation. A record 66% of bookings were by Central Portfolio tenants, highlighting the strong integration of Centricity within the Hongkong Land ecosystem.

Ms Iris Chan, Assistant General Manager, Hongkong Land, said: “Centricity is a focal point for the business and luxury lifestyle community in Central, Hong Kong. From Sotheby’s auctions and luxury brand fashion shows to wellness workshops and corporate functions, Centricity delivers exceptional experiences that enrich the working day lives of our more than 400 tenants and their guests.”

Centricity places a strong emphasis on work-life balance and has hosted more than 270 wellness-related events including yoga and meditation classes. Its wellbeing focus, coupled with innovations such as the app and Concentric’s ongoing success, reinforces Hongkong Land’s leadership in creating dynamic and engaging workspaces at the heart of the Central business district.

Hashtag: #HongkongLand

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Centricity

Launched in 2019, Centricity is an exclusive collection of spaces and services created to enhance working life for Hongkong Land tenants and their staff in Central, Hong Kong.

Centricity blends all-day dining (Catchic Bar & Restaurant), elegant event spaces (Concentric Event Space), a premium flexible office solution (Flex) and members’ privileges, all digitally linked through the Centricity App.

First launched in mid-2019, the Centricity App has enhanced tenants’ daily experiences within Hongkong Land’s Central Portfolio. App users can make restaurant bookings, order takeaways, monitor taxi queue times, check members’ events, book workplace services, arrange concierge services such as umbrella lending and shower room bookings, and receive privileges including select discounts at luxury stores and F&B outlets, among other features.

Hongkong Land

Hongkong Land is a major listed property investment, management and development group. The Group focuses on developing, owning and managing ultra-premium mixed-use real estate in Asian gateway cities, featuring Grade A office, luxury retail, residential and hospitality products. Its mixed-use real estate footprint spans more than 850,000 sq. m., with flagship projects in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. Its properties hold industry-leading green building certifications and attract the world’s foremost companies and luxury brands. The Group’s Hong Kong Central portfolio represents some 450,000 sq. m. of prime property. The Group has a further 165,000 sq. m. of prestigious office space in Singapore mainly held through joint ventures and five retail centres on the Chinese mainland, including a luxury retail centre at Wangfujing in Beijing. In Shanghai, the Group owns a 43% interest in a 1.1 million sq. m. mixed-use project in West Bund, which is due to be completed in 2028. Hongkong Land Holdings Limited is incorporated in Bermuda and has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, with secondary listings in Bermuda and Singapore. Hongkong Land is a member of the Jardine Matheson Group.

After holding borrowing costs near record highs for most of 2023, almost all major central banks started to cut rates in 2024. However, the pace of interest rate reductions varied, leading to a divergence in monetary policy expectations between different economies, which, in turn, resulted in notable exchange rate fluctuations among major currencies.

On a negative note, however, 2024 has been a year of lingering political uncertainty and geopolitical instability. Although investors learned to coexist with the simmering conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, a sense of underlying unease persisted. Adding to this sense of anxiety is the changing political landscape.

Indeed, numerous elections took place in tens of countries around the world in 2024. Investors were particularly concerned about the parliamentary elections in France, the general elections in the United Kingdom, and the presidential and congressional elections in the United States. The market still feels the effect of these elections, with traders and investors anticipating major changes in economic policies and trying to front-run their impact on global assets.

The U.S. Dollar (USD) has been the best-performing currency in 2024 among the 20 global currencies that Octa Broker tracks. From 29 December 2023 to 13 December 2024, the U.S. dollar index (DXY), which measures the value of the greenback against the basket of six foreign currencies (the euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Canadian dollar, Swedish krona, and Swiss franc) rose by almost 6%. However, the index has undergone substantial fluctuations over the course of the year. Kar Yong Ang, a financial market analyst at Octa Broker, explains: ‘The dollar index has been on a rollercoaster ride in 2024, soaring to new multi-month heights and plummeting to fresh multi-month lows. Although the greenback looks like the best-performing currency in 2024 so far, the lion’s share of its appreciation occurred during the latter part of the year and has been mostly driven by expectations for a major shift in U.S. trade policy.’

Indeed, the market is concerned that Donald Trump’s proposed immigration and trade policies could have inflationary consequences, prompting the Federal Reserve (Fed) to adopt a less dovish monetary policy. As a result, the divergence in investors’ monetary policy expectations between the Fed and other major central banks has widened, leading to higher capital inflows into the U.S. dollar. Furthermore, the U.S. economy has been outperforming other advanced economies in 2024 and is expected to continue to do better than the rest in 2025 as well. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), real gross domestic product (GDP) growth of advanced economies in 2024 will average just 1.8%, whereas the U.S. GDP is projected to expand by 2.8%.

Because the dollar advanced higher, most major currencies are poised to conclude the year with negative performance. The only exception is the British pound, which is anticipated to finish the year virtually unchanged compared to 2023. ‘The relative strength of the U.S. dollar is only one of many reasons why most other major currencies underperformed in 2024. Other factors, however, are specific to individual countries and a major bearish factor this year specifically has been the lack of political certainty, which currencies do not like,’ says Kar Yong Ang, a financial market analyst at Octa Broker. Indeed, EURUSD, the most liquid and widely traded foreign exchange (Forex) pair in the world, has been weakened by political uncertainty in the eurozone’s largest economies—France and Germany—where political stalemate led to high-profile resignations and early elections. Likewise, when the U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a snap parliamentary election, GBPUSD experienced one of the biggest one-day declines of 2024. Moreover, the sluggish growth in the eurozone and the U.K. has prompted investors to anticipate additional rate cuts from both the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE). In contrast, the Fed is expected to slow down its easing cycle, further widening the interest rate differential between the U.S. dollar on the one hand and the euro and sterling on the other.

Despite its safe-haven status, the Japanese yen (JPY) was the most volatile currency among the majors. Three-month implied options volatility for the yen, a measure of trader hedging demand, averaged around 9.73% in 2024, whereas the total average across seven major currencies was 7.46%. ‘USDJPY traders have had a wild ride in 2024. It has been a total rollercoaster, to be honest. I think fortunes were made and lost here very quickly. This outgoing year has been truly historical for the JPY,’ says Kar Yong Ang, a financial market analyst at Octa Broker. Indeed, during the year’s first half, the bullish dollar momentum has propelled the pair to a multi-decade high. Then, as rumours of potential intervention by Japanese authorities to bolster the yen began to spread, the USDJPY pair started to decline. A massive sell-off accelerated in late July after the Bank of Japan (BoJ) raised interest rates to 15-year highs and announced details on how it will reduce its huge bond buying. Kar Yong Ang explains: ‘At that time, it looked like BoJ was taking a surprisingly hawkish stance. Its decision really shook the markets and caused investors to reassess popular JPY carry-trades.’

The commodities’ performance varied greatly, and each deserves a separate story to tell, but coffee, lithium, gold, and silver have certainly been the biggest stories in 2024.

Just recently, the prompt-month futures contract of arabica coffee traded on Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) hit an all-time high. It is up some 70% year-over-year (y-o-y), which makes it the best-performing commodity in 2024 among 20 other commodities that Octa Broker tracks. ‘Like many other soft commodities, both arabica and robusta coffee futures are almost entirely driven by the whims of the weather. This year, Brazil, [the world’s largest coffee producer], experienced its worst drought in 70 years, whereas Vietnam, [another key producer] was faced with both drought and heavy rainfall,’ says Kar Yong Ang, a financial market analyst at Octa Broker. Indeed, according to official customs data, Vietnam’s coffee exports in the first half of this year were 893,820 metric tons, down 11.4% from a year earlier. Traders are very much concerned about the 2025 global crop outlook, and prices have reflected these worries.

In contrast, lithium has been the worst-performing commodity in 2024 as the sale of electric vehicles (EV) started to level off while capital investments from previous years boosted production capacity and led to oversupply. According to Refinitiv, the price of Lithium Hydroxide futures contracts traded on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) was down 42.3% y-o-y as of December 13, 2024.

As for precious metals, 2024 has been a record-setting year, especially for gold. The price for the yellow metal has been setting a new all-time high essentially every month in 2024. Kar Yong Ang, a financial market analyst at Octa Broker, outlines three main factors that have contributed to such a meteoric rise in gold prices. ‘It all boils down to three sources of demand: safe-haven demand due to intensifying geopolitical tensions, investor demand due to less tight monetary policy globally, and structural demand from global central banks as part of de-dollarization and diversification efforts.’ As many times before, gold has once again proved its underlying value as a protective asset during times of uncertainty and may continue to shine in the months ahead. Although the price of silver did not set any new records, its y-o-y performance was even more impressive than that of gold: +28.6% (as of December 13).

‘Perhaps surprisingly, but despite growing geopolitical tensions, crude oil prices went down annually. This is mostly because non-OPEC members—notably, the U.S.—have managed to increase production but also because investors were worrying about the health of the Chinese economy, the main importer of crude oil,’ says Kar Yong Ang, a financial market analyst at Octa Broker.

Top 20 commodities performance in 2024

2024 also witnessed significant developments in the cryptocurrency market, particularly for Bitcoin. On March 8, its price set a new all-time high of $70,000. On 5 December, it finally managed to achieve another key milestone of $100,000 per coin. However, Bitcoin was not the best-performing digital coin of 2024. The price of Doge has increased four-fold. Most of the gains in the crypto sphere were in response to Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential elections. Such a favourable market reaction to Trump’s victory stems from investors’ belief that his Administration, coupled with a friendly Congress, will effectively deregulate the crypto industry, facilitate its expansion, and implement a coherent regulatory framework that will serve investors and consumers for years to come. ‘It should be said, argues Kar Yong Ang, that this belief is not without foundation. Trump has managed to lure many crypto fans to his side with his bold moves, clear views, and a strong focus on deregulation.’

Top 5 crypto coins performance in 2024

Overall, 2024 has been a year of uneven economic growth and significant political shifts. While central banks successfully addressed inflationary pressures globally, diverging monetary policies led to notable currency fluctuations. At the same time, geopolitical tensions have been on the rise, while political uncertainty persisted.

The U.S. dollar emerged as the strongest currency, driven by a strong U.S. economy, a tightening monetary policy stance, and expectations of potential policy shifts. Other major currencies, such as the euro and the British pound, faced headwinds from economic sluggishness and political instability.

In the commodity markets, 2024 was a year of extremes. While arabica coffee prices soared to record highs due to supply shortages, lithium prices plummeted as oversupply concerns mounted. Precious metals, particularly gold, experienced a remarkable surge, driven by safe-haven demand, easing monetary conditions, and central bank buying.

Meanwhile, the main crypto coins broke new records and seem to be poised for major transformations in 2025.
Hashtag: #Octa

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Octa

Octa is an international broker that has been providing online trading services worldwide since 2011. It offers commission-free access to financial markets and various services used by clients from 180 countries who have opened more than 52 million trading accounts. To help its clients reach their investment goals, Octa offers free educational webinars, articles, and analytical tools.

The company is involved in a comprehensive network of charitable and humanitarian initiatives, including the improvement of educational infrastructure and short-notice relief projects supporting local communities.

In the APAC region, Octa received the ‘Best Trading Platform Malaysia 2024’ and the ‘Most Reliable Broker Asia 2023’ awards from Brands and Business Magazine and International Global Forex Awards, respectively.

Vietnam’s urbanization rate is expected to surpass 50% by 2025, and with over 50% of the population being millennials and Gen Z, the demand for co-living spaces in major cities like Ho Chi Minh City is set to rise. However, the market remains fragmented, and local operators face challenges, such as high vacancies, maintenance costs, and inconsistent service.

Keek Wen Khai, CEO & Co-founder of LiveIn, said: “Vietnam’s long-stay market remains highly fragmented, but we see great potential in driving sustainable growth through collaboration. By forming a strategic alliance with JinJoo Home, we aim to bring operators together, address their challenges, and elevate standards to deliver a better living experience for the next generation.”

Jason Wong, CEO & Founder of JinJoo Home, said: “We’re excited to join forces with LiveIn, a leading player in Southeast Asia. Our shared passion for improving young people’s living experience makes this alliance a natural fit. Together, we can combine our strengths and create a more dynamic and high-quality co-living market in Vietnam.”

The strategic alliance comes at a time when Vietnam’s residential real estate market is projected to reach USD 45.62 billion by 2029, with co-living playing a pivotal role. As many fragmented operators struggle to scale due to limited resources, LiveIn and JinJoo Home are focused on helping them seize this growth opportunity by combining LiveIn’s international standards with JinJoo Home’s extensive local expertise. LiveIn continually refines its product standards to address changing consumer preferences and ensure compliance with local regulatory requirements.

With 10,500 rooms across 200 buildings in 4 Southeast Asian countries, LiveIn brings its proven regional expertise in technology, operational management, and demand generation. Meanwhile, JinJoo Home’s deep local knowledge and strong presence in Ho Chi Minh City will help consolidate and support operators in adopting these best practices, tailored to meet the unique needs of the Vietnamese market.

The strategic alliance with JinJoo Home builds on LiveIn’s earlier strategic alliance with Hive, a regional leader in co-living renovations, to establish the LiveIn Global Renovation Division. Through this new division, LiveIn delivers thoughtfully designed homes that inspire growth and new experiences across all the markets it serves, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Both synergies further cement LiveIn’s position as a leading flexible housing provider in Southeast Asia.
Hashtag: #LiveIn #AffordableHousing

https://www.livein.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/livein-my/

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

LiveIn

LiveIn is dedicated to converting surplus properties into affordable, modern homes for young people across Southeast Asia. Driven by a mission to shift the fundamental way young people live and empower them to dream boldly, LiveIn operates close to 10,500 rooms in four countries, fostering vibrant communities for urban youth. Visit www.livein.com for more details.

JinJoo Home

JinJoo Home, a leading co-living provider in Ho Chi Minh City under Pearlcoin Group, offers premium long-term rental apartments. We create vibrant co-living communities with affordable, cozy design spaces, as well as maintenance, customer service, and more, providing young people with flexible living solutions. Visit www.jinjoohome.com for more details.